Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753–1784) was an American freed slave and poet who wrote the first book of poetry by an African-American. Sold into a slavery in West Africa at the age of around seven, she was taken to North America where she served the Wheatley family of Boston. Phillis was tutored in reading and writing by Mary, the Wheatleys' 18-year-old daughter, and was reading Latin and Greek classics from the age of twelve. Encouraged by the progressive Wheatleys who recognised her incredible literary talent, she wrote "To the University of Cambridge” when she was 14 and by 20 had found patronage in the form of Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon. Her works garnered acclaim in both England and the colonies and she became the first African American to make a living as a poet. This volume contains a collection of Wheatley's best poetry, including the titular poem “Being Brought from Africa to America”. Contents include: “Phillis Wheatley”, “Phillis Wheatley by Benjamin Brawley”, “To Maecenas”, “On Virtue”, “To the University of Cambridge”, “To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty”, “On Being Brought from Africa to America”, “On the Death of the Rev. Dr. Sewell”, “On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield”, etc. Ragged Hand is proudly publishing this brand new collection of classic poetry with a specially-commissioned biography of the author.

In an attempt to lay bare the historical and cultural roots of modern African American societies in the South and the British West Indies, Michael Mullin gives a vivid depiction of slave family life, economic strategies, and religion and their relationship to patterns of resistance and acculturation in two major plantation regions, the Caribbean and the American South. Generalized observations of plantation slavery, usually assumed to be the whole of Africans' experience, fail to provide definitive answers about how they met and often overcame the challenges and deprivations of their new lives. Mullin discusses three phases of slave resistance and religion in Anglo-America, both on and off plantations. During the first, or African, phase from the 1730s to the 1760s slave resistance was generally sudden, violently destructive, and charged with African ritual. The second phase, from the late 1760s to the early 1800s, involved plantation slaves who were more conservative and wary. The third phase, from the late 1760s to the second quarter of the nineteenth century, was led by assimilated blacks - artisans and drivers - who, having developed skills both on and off the plantation, led the large preemancipation rebellions. Mullin's case studies of slaveowners and plantation overseers draw on personal diaries and other documents to reveal memorable men whose approaches to their jobs varied widely and were as much affected by interactions with slaves as by personal background, the location of the plantation, and the economic climate of the times. Extensive archival and anecdotal sources inform this pioneering study of slavery as it was practiced in tidewater Virginia, on the rice coast of the Carolinas, and in Jamaica and Barbados. Bringing his training in anthropology to bear on sources from Great Britain, the Caribbean, and the United States, Mullin offers new and definitive information.

African American Psychology: From Africa to America provides comprehensive coverage of the field of African American psychology. Authors Faye Z. Belgrave and Kevin W. Allison skillfully convey the integration of African and American influences on the psychology of African Americans using a consistent theme throughout the text—the idea that understanding the psychology of African Americans is closely linked to understanding what is happening in the institutional systems in the United States. The Fourth Edition reflects notable advances and important developments in the field over the last several years, and includes evidence-based practices for improving the overall well-being of African American communities

“Opie delves into the history books to find true soul in the food of the South, including its place in the politics of black America.”—NPR.org Frederick Douglass Opie deconstructs and compares the foodways of people of African descent throughout the Americas, interprets the health legacies of black culinary traditions, and explains the concept of soul itself, revealing soul food to be an amalgamation of West and Central African social and cultural influences as well as the adaptations blacks made to the conditions of slavery and freedom in the Americas. Sampling from travel accounts, periodicals, government reports on food and diet, and interviews with more than thirty people born before 1945, Opie reconstructs an interrelated history of Moorish influence on the Iberian Peninsula, the African slave trade, slavery in the Americas, the emergence of Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the Great Depression, and the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. His grassroots approach reveals the global origins of soul food, the forces that shaped its development, and the distinctive cultural collaborations that occurred among Africans, Asians, Europeans, and Americans throughout history. Opie shows how food can be an indicator of social position, a site of community building and cultural identity, and a juncture at which different cultural traditions can develop and impact the collective health of a community. “Opie goes back to the sources and traces soul food’s development over the centuries. He shows how Southern slavery, segregation, and the Great Migration to the North’s urban areas all left their distinctive marks on today’s African American cuisine.”—Booklist “An insightful portrait of the social and religious relationship between people of African descent and their cuisine.”—FoodReference.com

Recent news media have exposed the horrific genocides in Rwanda, Darfur, and elsewhere, but little has been publicized about the unseen genocide committed by Muslims against millions of Christians in southern Sudan during the 1980s. From Africa to America: The Journey of a Lost Boy of Sudan provides a firsthand account of the atrocities caused by the same president and government committing genocide in Darfur today. Look through the eyes of one of the Lost Boys, a group of orphans who braved a dangerous trek through desert and jungle in order to flee the war-torn southern Sudan twenty years ago, as author Akol Makeer explains Sudanese cultural traditions and chronicles his life before and after the war. From Africa to America: The Journey of a Lost Boy of Sudan records years of human rights violations and bloodshed, the conversion of southern Sudanese from animism to Christianity during the war, the corruption of U.N. officials, and the sixteen-year journey of the Lost Boys from Sudan to Ethiopia, on to Kenya, and finally to religious and political freedom in America.

At the age of 19, Phillis Wheatley was the first black American poet to publish a book. Her elegies and odes offer fascinating glimpses of the beginnings of African-American literary traditions. Includes a selection from the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

This bold, innovative book promises to radically alter our understanding of the Atlantic slave trade, and the depths of its horrors. Stephanie E. Smallwood offers a penetrating look at the process of enslavement from its African origins through the Middle Passage and into the American slave market. Saltwater Slavery is animated by deep research and gives us a graphic experience of the slave trade from the vantage point of the slaves themselves. The result is both a remarkable transatlantic view of the culture of enslavement, and a painful, intimate vision of the bloody, daily business of the slave trade.

In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, pianist Randy Weston and bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik celebrated with song the revolutions spreading across Africa. In Ghana and South Africa, drummer Guy Warren and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin fused local musical forms with the dizzying innovations of modern jazz. These four were among hundreds of musicians in the 1950's and '60's who forged connections between jazz and Africa that definitively reshaped both their music and the world. Each artist identified in particular ways with Africa's struggle for liberation and made music dedicated to, or inspired by, demands for independence and self-determination. That music was the wild, boundary-breaking exultation of modern jazz. The result was an abundance of conversation, collaboration, and tension between African and African American musicians during the era of decolonization. This collective biography demonstrates how modern Africa reshaped jazz, how modern jazz helped form a new African identity, and how musical convergences and crossings altered politics and culture on both continents. In a crucial moment when freedom electrified the African diaspora, these black artists sought one another out to create new modes of expression. Documenting individuals and places, from Lagos to Chicago, from New York to Cape Town, Robin Kelley gives us a meditation on modernity: we see innovation not as an imposition from the West but rather as indigenous, multilingual, and messy, the result of innumerable exchanges across a breadth of cultures.

With a booming economy that afforded numerous opportunities for immigrants throughout the 1990s, the Twin Cities area has attracted people of African descent from throughout the United States and the world and is fast becoming a transnational metropolis. Minnesota's largest urban area, the region now also has the country's most diverse black population. A closely drawn ethnography, Creating Africa in America: Translocal Identity in an Emerging World City seeks to understand and evaluate the process of identity formation in the context of globalization in a way that is also site specific. Bringing to this study a rich and interesting professional history and expertise, Jacqueline Copeland-Carson focuses on a Minneapolis-based nonprofit, the Cultural Wellness Center, which combines different ethnic approaches to bodily health and community well-being as the basis for a shared, translocal "African" culture. The book explores how the body can become a surrogate locus for identity, thus displacing territory as the key referent for organizing and experiencing African diasporan diversity. Showing how alternatives are created to mainstream majority and Afrocentric approaches to identity, she addresses the way that bridges can be built in the African diaspora among different African immigrant, African American, and other groups. As this thoughtful and compassionate ethnographic study shows, the fact that there is no simple and concrete way to define how one can be African in contemporary America reflects the tangled nature of cultural processes and social relations at large. Copeland-Carson demonstrates the cultural creativity and social dexterity of people living in an urban setting, and suggests that anthropologists give more attention to the role of the nonprofit sector as a forum for creating community and identity throughout African diasporan history in the United States.

This is an introduction to the entire history of British involvement with slavery and the slave trade, which especially focuses on the two centuries from 1650, and covers the Atlantic world, especially North America and the West Indies, as well as the Cape Colony, Mauritius, and India. -;Slavery and the British Empire provides a clear overview of the entire history of British involvement with slavery and the slave trade, from the Cape Colony to the Caribbean. The book combines economic, social, political, cultural, and demographic history, with a particular focus on the Atlantic world and the plantations of North America and the West Indies from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. Kenneth Morgan analyses the distribution of slaves within the empire and how this changed over time; the world of merchants and planters; the organization and impact of the triangular slave trade; the work and culture of the enslaved; slave demography; health and family life; resistance and rebellions; the impact of the anti-slavery movement; and the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 and of slavery itself in most of the British empire in 1834. As well as providing the ideal introduction to the history of British involvement in the slave trade, this book also shows just how deeply embedded slavery was in British domestic and imperial history - and just how long it took for British involvement in slavery to die, even after emancipation. -;...a clear overview of the entire history of British involvement with slavery and the slave trade - Spartacus Review